min-maxing in online games promotes an environment of elitism that forces anyone who plays with the min-maxer to conform to a very narrow play-style; this by-default limits gameplay options for other players, and often leads to ridicule and negative experiences when the non-min-maxer does not have the “perfect build for tanking Odin” or whatever.
min-maxers are boa constrictors wrapped around innocent little field mice. the mice just want some cheese but the snakes are eating them alive and i am the mongoose
stop min-maxing. start max-mining.
discuss.
Ooh Ragnarok… wasn’t expecting the memories of my unfinished Agi knight build to come flooding back when I opened Lemmy today.
i never thought i’d see ragnarok reference in lemmy. i always go back to that game once every 5 yearish. they really dont make games like that nowadays.
imo min maxing only starts as a problem when you can share your build to the masses, we dont really like seeing something done for less than the absolute max efficiency. even in games that dont have much build (ffxiv for example) people still blacklist certain jobs or ‘build’ even though it only have like couple minutes of difference between clear times. sites like fflog or wow equivalent are cancer.
on the other hand. if you make every silly build viable it makes the game really easy and may not cater to many people.
imo the solution might lie in other aspects of the game like social and other unorthodox content, but im not sure if any dev is willing to make such a risky system.
ffxiv does a decent job at limiting this type of player behavior in that the director has publicly stated parsers/logging are prohibited, enshrined it in the code of conduct, and has been outspoken about his disapproval for parsing culture.
“it’s a tool for bullying … 100% confident in that … if we implement a (parser) we know that there will be group invites like “prove you can do xxxx DPS” and we never want that to happen.”
The other problem with min-maxing is that when a big chunk of users do it, content needs to be scaled for those users. Said content is then very difficult or impossible for people playing more casually, which feeds into the elitism loop and potentially makes more people into min-maxers.
this is super problematic when you’re DMing for a tabletop campaign. I had a campaign where one player’s character was a good deal stronger than all the others. Maybe it wasn’t a result of min-maxing alone, but also of good stat rolls and it just so happened that the build this player picked was very strong. But it was always super difficult to come up with enemies that could threaten the strong character while not being at risk to 1-hit kill the weaker ones.
I sort of saw it coming when I looked at the character sheets, but didn’t want to make players change anything about their characters. But maybe a good DM (or good game designer) can anticipate this really well and make it so the strongest and weakest characters aren’t that far apart?
I’m not a DM, but yeah I think you must have options. From having the enemies try to gang up on what they perceive as the biggest threat (admittedly, this could go wrong a lot of ways), to contriving story reasons to give the weaker characters better gear or buffs to bring them up to the same level… to just rolling with it and letting that one guy be strong, balancing the encounters against the median player.
None of them are ideal but I feel like I might try a combination of subtle buffs for the others with the “roll with it” option.
Of course also as a DM you can – and perhaps should – just explain the issue to your players so they might understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Your primary job as DM is to help everyone have a good time, after all. :)
This is pretty much how I (tried to) handle it. And also talking about it openly. Luckily the players are all mature enough to just laugh it off. (That strong character was a bit lacking in the mental department, and since it wasn’t such a combat focused campaign it also evened out somewhat. The great merits of tabletop being more than the hack & slay that most of its computer game adaptions are. :)
great insight, didn’t even consider this.
I think another aspect of min maxxers not liking “casuals” is that if you didn’t research your build to know to use the min-max settings, you probably didn’t research other things. Are you also going into the encounter blind? It’s a team effort and people want to maximize their chances of success.
Maybe a group of non minmaxxers can clear the content, but they have to play better than the group of minmaxxers, because the extra output makes up for technical mistakes made.
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@[email protected] this is a quality lemmy. kudos to the person who posted this lemmy (totally not me).
Min-maxing only affects others in a competitive environment, and it always will since competition will naturally gravitate toward the easiest to employ and most effective strategies to complete the goal and win. Which is what min-maxing is, really; just being efficient.
Video games with stat systems, online role playing games specifically, tend to turn into competitive games even if there is no PVP to be had. This is due to party composition, mostly; why take a less-than-perfect mage when you could take the perfect mage? When loot and numbers come into play, people get nitpicky, mean, and gatekeepy. The problem is that taking the less-than-perfect mage has no impact on content completion other than their damage numbers are slightly lower and it might take an extra minute to kill a boss; does this minor difference justify being denied a spot in a party? I would argue: no. Some would argue the opposite and I wouldn’t want to play video games with those people.
min-maxing is the capitalism in computer games. It dtrives for pure “optimization”, therefore rampantly destroying everything in its path.
The one true path to happiness does not know capitalism.
